Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843

Misty Krueger (Ed.)

2021
234 pages
$36.95
ISBN 9781684482962
Transits

This important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men's travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic - some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian's writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge's travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannett, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women's travel therein across the long eighteenth century.

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Reviews

"The volume's organization, meant to question (and push) boundaries between real and imagined travel, between 'factual' and 'fictional' accounts, is useful. Its most important contribution is the attention to the intersection of gender and empire as well as many of the authors' careful attention to colonial subjectivity. Those who read, research, or teach this period will certainly find new sources to digest and productive ways of reimagining familiar material."- Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring 2023

"Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 is an exciting and welcome addition to this field with contributions by established and new scholars. . . . Focused as a whole on intersectional approaches to the ways that travel - whether forced, coerced, or voluntary - is experienced by women across a variety of geographical locations, identity categories, and relations to colonialism, the collection's sensitivity to intersectional differences between women, a deep engagement with a diversity of genres, and the considerable geographic coverage are genuine strengths. . . . This valuable and necessary collection will be a useful resource for scholars and students for decades to come." - Eighteenth-Century Fiction, January 2023

"[E]xplicitly and consistently quer[ies] white European women's complicity with, and challenges to, racism, colonialism, and empire."- Eighteenth-Century Fiction, January 2022

"Following historical and fictional women as they journey transatlantically and beyond, this collection offers welcome insight into the many transformations - material and intellectual - produced by travel. For some, the oceanic journey might be revelatory and liberatory; alternatively or simultaneously, it might reproduce exoticization and empire. In presenting a variety of experiences and imaginings, this book is for interdisciplinary scholars of gender and also race, colonialism, and more in the circum-Atlantic eighteenth century."- Caroline Wigginton, co-editor of Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions

"The strengths of this volume are many. Foremost, its clever organization illuminates the resonances between women travelers in different modes: as historical figures, writers, and characters. Its coverage offers fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts. The combination of these features makes this a useful, indeed indispensable, volume for transatlantic studies."- Aaron Hanlon, author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism

About the editor:

Misty Krueger is an assistant professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches seventeenth- through nineteenth-century literature and writing. She was the 2017 Jane Austen Society of North American International Visitor, has co-edited an issue for the Austen journal Persuasions On-Line, and has published essays on Austen juvenilia, novels, adaptation, pedagogy, and social media. She has also published on Delarivier Manley, Restoration Shakespearean adaptations, and William Blake.

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Cloth: $120.00, 9781684482979; PDF: $36.95, 9781684483006; EPUB: $36.95, 9781684482986